Phoenix Legend tells us that the most high-end business wars often appear in the simplest way

Recently, the topic #Listen to Phoenix Legend and hear the business war# has suddenly become a hot search. It turns out that NetEase Cloud Music and QQ Music have "fought" because of Phoenix Legend. What happened specifically? Let's take a look at the analysis in this article.

In the past two days, the topic #Listening to Phoenix Legend and hearing business war# suddenly became a hot search on Weibo, leaving people confused.

When I clicked on it, I found out that the "old enemies" NetEase Cloud Music and QQ Music were fighting again because of Phoenix Legend.

The cause of the incident was that on November 28, NetEase Cloud Music officially announced the return of all copyrights of Phoenix Legend, and launched a six-week limited free welfare activity on the site in advance, which meant that all users could listen to Phoenix Legend's songs during this period. On the one hand, this method let users know the news of the return of Phoenix Legend's copyright, and on the other hand, it was also a wave of benefits for users.

Unexpectedly, perhaps because the Phoenix Legend national group has such great influence, QQ Music immediately launched a corresponding limited-time free event on its homepage that day.

The specific content is that from November 27th to January 7th, Phoenix Legend songs will be "free for a limited time", and each song of Phoenix Legend will be specially labeled "free for a limited time". It can be said that the event is fully scheduled.

Do you think that secretly preparing such directly targeted activities and catching the opponent off guard is all there is to "business warfare"?

This is just the beginning. A battle with both sides will be more interesting.

That afternoon, after seeing Q Music's "unethical" behavior, NetEase Cloud Music responded quickly and added benefits on top of the previous free period, extending the entire free period by 5 weeks, with the deadline being January 15th.

Note that the key point here is that the entire free period is exactly one week longer than QQ Music. You say that this is not a secret competition between the two parties, anyway, I don't believe it.

This made the netizens who loved to watch the show very happy. They rushed to the scene of the "business war" caused by the national group to watch the excitement. All kinds of creative memes were flying around, and the topic #Listening to Phoenix Legend and hearing business war# even became a hot search.

For music fans who like to watch the show, the more the two sides escalate the competition, the better. At present, NetEase Cloud Music is leading by one week, and QQ Music has not yet responded whether it will follow up.

This "business war" is expected to continue for some time, but in fact, this is not the first time that the two sides have engaged in a "business war" in the field of content copyright.

We briefly reviewed the past data and found that since last year, over the past year or so, on the one hand, NetEase Cloud Music has been continuously returning copyrights, gradually making up for its disadvantages in copyright; on the other hand, QQ Music has been following with corresponding hedging actions, trying to continue its advantage in copyright.

According to incomplete statistics, every time NetEase Cloud Music releases a copyright return message, QQ Music will almost always launch a marketing or welfare activity for the copyrighted content within a few minutes or a few days.

For example, on January 1, 2019, NetEase Cloud Music officially announced the return of Believe Music, which owns the copyrights of popular musicians such as Jonathan Lee, Mayday and Rene Liu, at 10 a.m. At the same time, they also made a call to all Mayday fans the day before. After the fans answered the call, they found that the person on the other end of the line was singing "Gentleness" at the concert. This unique #MaydayCallMeToo# campaign quickly became a hot search, earning the tears of countless fans.

Just 15 minutes after NetEase Cloud Music made the official announcement, QQ Music immediately launched a three-month limited-time free promotion for the entire Believe Music library and launched a special promotion page. Obviously, NetEase Cloud Music's acquisition of such a heavyweight copyright as Mayday is a "danger signal."

The example of believing in music is certainly not an isolated case.

On April 6 last year, Fumao Records, which owns well-known artists such as Angela Zhang, Harlem Yu, and Christine Fan, returned to NetEase Cloud Music. NetEase Cloud Music officially announced the news at 10:32 am on the same day and launched an event page; 3 minutes later, QQ Music released the content plan of "Let's Dig for Treasures at Fumao Records", singing a rival tune.

Three months later, on July 21, 2023, NetEase Cloud Music announced that it had reached a copyright cooperation with South Korea's YG Entertainment and planned a K-POP nostalgia content; however, this time QQ Music only launched a true fan test activity planned for YG artists four days later.

The latest marketing "competition" took place in April this year. On March 30, NetEase Cloud Music officially announced the successful renewal of its contract with the famous record company Rolling Stone, and launched a series of classic review content; QQ Music also launched a special content topic of "Golden Song Memories" of Rolling Stone Records three days later.

Judging from the time, content, specific measures and other aspects of each activity released by both parties, this correlation can be called a "strong correlation" and it is not an exaggeration to say that it is "tit for tat".

Behind the scenes, if you have some understanding of the copyright status of the online music industry, you can actually understand the offensive and defensive efforts of both sides from these "business wars".

Perhaps it was because it had suffered enough losses from the copyright gap before. We roughly counted that since 2021, NetEase Cloud Music has started a battle to recover its lost ground in copyright.
From the second half of 2021 to now, in about two years, NetEase Cloud has successively signed back the copyrights of major companies such as Modern Sky, Emperor Entertainment Group, China Record Group, Fumao Records, SM Company, YG Entertainment, Times Peak, Believe Music and Rolling Stone, a total of more than a dozen companies.

Specifically, the works of musicians from Jonathan Lee to Mayday, Angela Chang and Jackson Yee have all turned from gray to bright on NetEase Cloud Music. If you were a competitor, would you be in a hurry?

If both parties own certain copyrighted content, then it is no longer a game of "absolute winner" as to who has it and who doesn't, but becomes a game of who can "use" the copyright better, or who can "play" it better.

Take the Phoenix Legend event for example. Since mid-November, NetEase Cloud Music has started pre-promotion activities on major social platforms. On November 17, they launched the "Get Phoenix Legend Return Gift" pre-promotion activity on the site ten days in advance. As long as users participate in this activity, they can enjoy the benefits of Phoenix Legend songs for 6 weeks + VIP vinyl membership season card discounts + Phoenix Legend return exclusive avatar frame.

At the same time, NetEase Cloud has also launched some fun question-and-answer activities related to Phoenix Legend on the activity page of the site, allowing users to know the content of the activities in an easier way and expanding the influence of Phoenix Legend's own content.

What’s even more interesting is their actions on social media. For example, on Bilibili, where young people gather the most, the official account of NetEase Cloud Music first added a small note saying “I only love the Phoenix Legend version” around the 20th, and then started a series of “crazy” behaviors, such as publicly expressing love in an “abnormal” tone, and running to a lot of accounts that mentioned Phoenix Legend and shouting “I bought the copyright of Phoenix Legend” with “crazy” quotes.

You know what, this series of "crazy" behavior that lasted for more than a week not only did not disgust the young people on Bilibili, but instead made fans who like Phoenix Legend feel interesting and passionate about it, and the interaction rate between the two sides was very high.

Let’s take a look at the event planning content launched by QQ Music on the site. It is basically the same “exclusive” video greetings and song guessing games. Those who understand will understand.

Of course, netizens naturally welcome this kind of "competition" and "competition" with each other in providing benefits and organizing activities for users.

Negative "business wars" are just fighting, while positive "business wars" can benefit users.

In an era when copyright content among various music platforms is becoming increasingly similar, we also call on all parties to learn from the successful experience of the "Phoenix Legend Business War" between NetEase Cloud and Q Music, and focus more on how to improve service quality and provide benefits to users.

After all, high-quality content will always be the fundamental driving force for the development of the music industry.

Author: Weekend; Editor: Fan Zhihui

Source public account: Music Pioneer (ID: nakedmusic), interpreting the music industry and witnessing its golden age.